It is so depressing to watch a movie that should have been fun, but isn’t. The Spiral is worse than a prank gone wrong. It’s even worse than telling someone on their way home from a funeral to smile. When a movie should have been a camp delight and is instead a soggy nightmare, there’s no way to save it. With The Spiral the best you can do is turn around and go the other way.
The Spiral’s Plot & Premise: A Faustian Bargain Gone Wrong
It’s a shame to be so vicious about a movie with such excellent production design but none of the money was well spent. Middle-aged Anna (Jasmine Trinca) shows up uninvited in a torrential rainstorm on the doorstep of her daughter Alice (Romana Maggiora Vergano). Anna has decided to unburden herself of a secret she has kept for most of Alice’s life because it’s a matter of life and death!!!! Well, sort of. The movie is mostly told in flashback, starting when they were a happy family: Anna was married to Walter (Adriano Giannini), they own a successful chain of high-end stores, and in addition to Alice they have a perfect older son Tobia. Also a dog, Zuppa (and well done to whoever decided to name the dog ‘Soup’). But at a major housewarming party to show off their ginormous new mansion, Zuppa mauls Alice so badly she risks losing a leg. Her child modelling career is ruined!!!! Anna, with her designer suit and gold jewellery splattered with blood is beside herself until a stranger (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi having a wonderful time) appears next to her in the hospital. This stranger offers Anna a deal. Brace yourselves: Alice’s leg will be saved if in return she agrees for Tobia to be fat. This is obviously the worst thing Anna can possibly imagine – her son???? Her precious baby?????? Fat??????????? – but she will do anything to protect Alice, even make impossible deals about her children’s health with weird women in institutional hallways. So she agrees.
Family Fallout: Compounding Consequences and Cruel Twists
But it works. Alice’s leg miraculously heals and the formerly sparky Tobia (now Andrea Genovese) turns into a depressed shut-in, viciously bullied at school and home for his size and absolutely incapable of doing anything about it. Walter is beside himself that his perfect children have turned out to be not so much, so the mood in their once-happy home is poisonous, nasty, unpleasant, etc. Because Anna knows what she did, she keeps her mouth shut and lets it all happen. Over the years the consequences from that first bargain pile up, and up, and up. For one thing (and do try not to faint when reading the next sentence), the adult Alice has not become a model but a lesbian; for another, she is barely speaking to her mother because she thinks Anna has gone completely crazy. Yet every time Anna thinks things couldn’t get any worse, there the stranger is again, in her trenchcoat, smirking and purring as if Anna was a mouse and she the cat.
Tone and Direction: Why the Satire Collapses into Mean-Spiritedness
The thing is, of course, is that she should have been. Director Paolo Strippoli, who co-wrote the script with Salvatore De Chirico, should have been able to twist the off-kilter cinematography of Cristiano Di Nicola and the fevered editing of Federico Palmerini into a hysterical classic. The trouble is the reaction to Tobia’s weight gain, which includes both physical and emotional abuse from Walter and a scene of him being stripped naked at school by other children for Alice to find, is so genuinely nasty that any laughter chokes in the throat. Once the possibilities for amusing melodrama are gone they don’t come back, though the Venice Film Festival audience did gratefully lap up every ounce of Ms. Bruni Tedeschi’s performance so we could at least have a little fun. But we should have had a lot.
Final Verdict: A Missed Opportunity for 80s Camp Cinema
The Spiral had the potential for being an 80s-style classic in the best way, the kind of movie you watch with glee every time it comes on because the whole thing is so over-the-top wild. It came so close, especially with the outrageous ending, but because of the sincerity of the fatphobia the whole thing collapses. It didn’t have to be this way; Ms. Trinca absolutely could have pulled off a whole shoulder-padded hootenanny if the mood had allowed her to. But The Spiral chose genuine disgust instead of mockery and ruined itself out of spite.
The Spiral (L’estranea) is now playing in limited Italian theaters.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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